I’ve been given a bunch of feedback on Herenow. I thought I’d make a blog post to list the main feature requests that my friends and other users have given me.

Reply to Message

People want to be able to click on a message and see a bit more detail about it, and be able to reply to the message, which will send a notification to the person who wrote the message, even if that person is no longer at the location where they left the message. So if someone leaves a message that says “the honest rob burger is amazing” at Ekims, you can reply to that person and say ‘awww damn thanks for the recommendation the blue cheese aoili was amazing yo’.

Less battery usage on iOS

I think I fixed this in the 1.2 release, but some friends are still reporting that Herenow is just constantly using the GPS on their phone. I’ll need to look more into this. I’d also like to do that trick where you poll the accelerometer to see if you are stationary before hitting up the GPS, I don’t know if this would work for Herenow though.

Open messages from notifications

If you get a notification while you’re driving, when you click on the notification, it doesn’t show you the relevant message, it shows you the messages from wherever you are now, which is annoying, you never get to collect those messages.

Ping people nearby

There should be a button where you can ping to see if any other herenow users are nearby, without actually having to write a message. Then you could start a conversation with them.

Allow shadowbanning

I currently don’t have any UI for banning offensive users. This needs to happen. Basically, if 2-3 people flag a message, that message should show up in some UI on my phone, and I should be able to shadowban the user so they’re not offending other people.

Allow purchasing a username

So that businesses, or people with a spare $2 can purchase a username, and not post anonymously, but as captainbenis, or whatever.

Yik Yak

I know you’re not meant to compare your app to anyone elses, you’re only meant to focus on your users and your todolist, but I keep checking in on yik yak from time to time. It’s massively popular in US universities, dozens of messages a minute. I think herenow is quite different from Yik Yak, but Yik Yak is basically exactly what I had in mind when I posted this tweet back in May 2013, except I found Spraffl, and decided not to try and build it myself.

Maybe that’s a good reason to build and push herenow properly, so that the next company to come along and build a good leaving-notes-at-location app is my company, not some other startup. Hah. :)